Valves’ long-awaited handheld game console Steam Deck will be officially starting deliveries on February 25th, and the first batch of games verified by Steam Deck has already been published. After a slight delay at the end of last year, the Steam Deck is almost here, and now Valve has confirmed that its long-awaited portable gaming PC will start shipping on February 28th. Valves Steam Deck, the company’s first handheld gaming device, will go on sale on February 28 for pre-order customers.
After announcing the handheld last summer with an expected delivery date of December 2021, delaying the launch by two months, Valve will now continue the ordering process at the end of next month. That’s when Valve will send an email to an unconfirmed number of pre-order customers asking them to pay the asking price for the rest of the consoles. Anyone ordering now will have to wait until the end of Q2 2022 for an order to be delivered, so expect many zero-day handhelds to end up in auctions at inflated prices.
Pre-orders are currently limited to the US, Canada, UK, and EU, but Valve says availability will expand over time. Unfortunately, if you want to get it on that launch date, you’ll need to pre-order a spot in July. So the company pushed the release date back a few months, and now Valve says it will start notifying customers that their orders are ready on Friday, February 25, and those who paid $5 to pre-order will have 72 hours. Pay the rest. The purchase price for the pre-order model must be sent out next Monday, or Valve will go to the order list and offer others the chance to buy it.
The first wave of order emails will be sent “shortly after” at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST / 6:00 PM BST on February 25 in the same order in which pre-orders were received, so the system will still be serviced on a first-come, first-served basis. The first batch of booking emails should arrive shortly and will be sent weekly after initial deliveries. The first batch of these emails are expected to go out on February 25th, so make sure you have access to the address you used to pre-order the Steam deck or you could lose it.
Pre-orders are still available, but Valve plans to contact buyers in the order in which reservations were made. As such, Valve will soon be sending out pre-order invitations (in batches) to potential customers. Invitations will be sent to people in the order they were originally booked, so if you were one of the last people to make a $5 deposit, the email won’t show up in your inbox right away.
Valve says it will review all games in Steam’s massive library to confirm they are compatible with Steam Deck, including if they require special settings or additional hardware. Valve has confirmed that the deck systems will be sent out to members of the press “soon” and that the systems are under a revision embargo until February 25th.